Subject:Identification of Citation Title Naming Conventions for Geospatial Metadata

Program Area:Data Management.

Purpose:This Instruction Memorandum (IM) transmits the guidelines for the structure of Identification of Citation Title Naming Convention for Geospatial Metadata (citation title).

Policy/Action: The attached guidelines set the Bureau standard and should be applied when naming citation titles for newly published geospatial metadata.A standardized structure for naming citation titles will enable easier search and discovery of datasets.Legacy titles of existing geospatial metadata already published will be edited to conform to this new structure upon replacement through an established update cycle.

As federal agencies are required to post datasets on Data.gov, this standard structure ensures branding of BLM datasets by requiring that all new datasets published will have “BLM” as the first identifier in the title.Districts with Unions are reminded to notify their unions of this instruction memorandum and satisfy any bargaining obligations before implementation.Your servicing Human Resources Office or Labor Relations Specialist can provide you with assistance in this matter.

Timeframe:Effective Immediately.

Budget Impact:None.

Background:The Corporate Metadata Advisory Team (CMAT) is a national BLM team composed of nine members and two advisory members. The team provides leadership regarding all business functions within the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) pertaining to corporate metadata.They coordinate and lead activities to ensure that corporate metadata is created, made accessible, and provides needed information about the BLM’s business.

At the August 2010 annual meeting, one of the issues CMAT addressed was the inadequate search and discovery of geospatial datasets due to poor structure of the citation title of geospatial metadata.This issue is further compounded by inconsistency in naming citation titles throughout the agency.